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36 | ‘Dump Slade 2000’

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ARLthey hny o Ad duBBed hiM “the new General Custer,” vow-

ing that sooner or later he’d meet his Little Bighorn. When the slot

machines started jingling they had many more arrows in their

quiver.

From the banks of the Columbia to Narragansett Bay, where Gorton’s

famished forefathers were befriended by the natives in the 1600s, the

tribes were once independent nations. “They say they are sovereigns, but

the courts call them quasi-sovereigns,” Gorton said in 1997, italics his.

“They’re nations within a nation.” Ultimate authority still rested with the

Great White Father, the senator said, and Congress still helped distribute

the beads. Gorton’s subcommittee chairmanship gave him wide latitude

over appropriations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.^1

The tribes’ long-festering grudge against Gorton became flat-out war

when he cut their federal assistance by 28 percent in 1995 as part of the

Republican deficit-reduction plan. He also took up the complaints of non-

Indians living on reservations, saying it was fundamentally unfair for “a

closed, ethnic group” to have immunity from lawsuits. Inholders on the

Lummi reservation near Bellingham told Gorton their wells were virtu-

ally dry because the tribe was hogging the ground water aquifer. Pointing

to a treaty signed in 1855, the Lummis maintained they had senior status

in the water rights dispute. Nevertheless, they said they were attempting

to reach an equitable settlement. Gorton threatened to slash half of the

tribe’s federal assistance if it persisted in restricting water use by non-

Indians, who comprised nearly half of the reservation’s population.^2

Conrad Burns, Gorton’s Republican colleague from Montana, joined

the fray that year when the Crow Tribe, in a delicious turn of events, levied

a 4 percent B&O tax on businesses catering to tourists visiting the Custer

battlefield. “Taxation without representation!” cried the non-Indian busi-

nesses, refusing to pay. Some 40 percent of the reservation was owned by

non-Indians. Much of Indian Country in both states was a checkerboard

of Indian and non-Indian ownerships.^3